Have you sifted through the best entrepreneur books and still can't find what you're looking for? Check out our list of the best business books you might not have thought about
Have you read The 4-Hour Workweek, The Hard Thing About Hard Things and every other over-referenced business book? Looking for a perspective different from everyone else? You’ve come to the right place.
Here are five books that offer key learnings for any entrepreneur. They may not be obvious picks, and some of them definitely wouldn't be found in the business section of Barnes & Noble, but all offer valuable takeaways and insight.
Alchemy
Rory Sutherland
Why do biscuits taste worse, and sell poorly, when they are described as low-fat on the packaging, even if they perform the same as the full-fat equivalent in blind taste tests? How is it that the only real competitor to the Pepsi and Coca Cola soft drink hegemony in the last 30 years is Red Bull—a drink that’s more expensive, comes in a smaller quantity and tastes objectionably horrible? Sometimes, there are no rational explanations. It’s times like these, writes Rory Sutherland, that we must turn to the seemingly irrational. Sutherland, the vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Group, is the co-founder of a behavioural science practice within the agency that tries to find the answers to the questions that behavioural economics and market research—the traditional crutches executives rely on to make decisions—can’t answer.
Sutherland’s team spot “unseen opportunities in consumer behaviour”—often small, contextual changes that have a huge effect on the decisions we make. How moving the location of a button on an e-commerce site brought in an extra US$30 million a year in one company, or adding a few lines to a call centre script tripled sales in another are just two of the case studies Sutherland cites. Packed with personality and wit as well as insight, Alchemy is ideal for anyone who, as the book’s subtitle states, is looking for “the surprising power of ideas that don’t make sense”.
Best for Anyone building a B2C product.
Quote this “Metrics, and especially averages, encourage you to focus on the middle of a market, but innovation happens at the extremes.”